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Aditya Malik writes "Wired has an interesting story up about how a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building 'protocells' from artificial molecules which are very close to satisfying the conditions for being 'alive.' 'Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.' This obviously raises some questions about creationism, not to mention some scary bio-research-gone-wild scenarios."

linuxwrangler writes "Preparing for English-speaking visitors, a restaurant in China recently ran its name through an online translator, took the result, then purchased and mounted a large sign displaying the English version of their name: Translate Server Error." This one has been around for a couple of weeks but it's destined to become a classic.

I've found TargetKiller to be quite useful. I also have a disliking of pages that insist on opening things in new tabs. It's my browser after all.

A sibling post mentioned TabMixPlus. I have avoided this addon since the mid Fx 2.x days as it has become rather bloaty for my liking. TargetKiller and Focus Last Selected Tab add all the tab functionally I want/need for Fx 3.

ohxten writes "Stefan Grothkopp has come up with a pretty neat tool called goosh. It's essentially a browser-oriented, shell-like interface that allows you to quickly search Google (and images and news) and Wikipedia and get information in a text-only format. This is quite possibly the coolest thing I've seen in a good while."

Consul writes "What is the oldest piece of code that is still in use today, that has not actually been retyped or reimplemented in some way? By 'piece of code,' I'm of course referring to a complete algorithm, and not just a single line." The question would have a different answer if emulation, in multiple layers, is allowed.

Anonymous Meoward writes "Today Hans Reiser was found guilty of first degree murder in Oakland, California. Quoting Wired: 'In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead... The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.' Whether he really did it or not, Hans basically just didn't know when to shut up."

enemi writes "Just a few days after Safari released version 3.1, Opera employee David Storey writes on his blog that they've overtaken Apple's browser in the Acid3 test. In the race to be the first to reach the reference rendering, Opera's software leads now with 98%, closely following by Safari with 96% and Firefox 3 beta 4 with 71%. He also noted the implemented features will not make a public appearance in the following weeks, because they are getting close to releasing Opera 9.5. That version has been under public testing since September and the new CSS3 color modes and font rendering features might further delay this. They will probably show the score in a preview build soon and wait for a post 9.5 stable build to release the new features to the public."Update: 03/26 21:21 GMT by Z: Opera is now at 100%, apparently, with Safari close behind at 98%.
Update: 03/27 by J: Public build r31356 of WebKit (Safari's rendering engine) is at 100%.

wiredog writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Microsoft is developing a program that classifies news stories according to whether liberal or conservative bloggers are linking to them and also measures the 'emotional intensity' based on the frequency of keywords in the blog posts." If you would like to jump right to the tool you can check out "Blews" on the Microsoft site.